Do spiders share webs? Re-knowing nature through collaborative affective work

The “green” transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy is vital to curb global emissions and yet socially contested. Locally this contestation emerges as seemingly irresolvable conflicts around solar and wind power projects. Findings from an empirical research collaboration with a public utility company highlight the challenges with establishing participatory community-based energy practices given the current technocratization and commercialization of renewable energy. Subject-scientific psychological insights reveal that the intersubjective work of reconfiguring existing profit/stock understandings and practices of energy sourcing toward understandings and practices of commons/flows of energy requires collective affective work that needs further theorizing. The paper proposes common sensing as the proto-conceptualization for this kind of re-knowing nature through work/energy.
The paper argues that, by revisiting Leontjev’s seminal spider example of our internally related ecology, a general need for shared exploration of environments can be traced: “threading webs” is not a solitary activity on given the state of the singular organism (for example, a person’s subjective reasons for action), but concurrently a social anticipatory and an evaluative sensing of possible (re)configurations of shared practices/environments. Empirical examples will underline how moments of common sensing hinge upon shared differences and thus a matter of developing each other’s possibilities for participation. Democratic inclusion in reconfiguring energy systems can accordingly not alone be juridically determined; it must (also) acknowledge the indeterminacy of shared embodied engagement in common causes.